Finding her own spot in the Hawai'i landscape

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

Dina Ruiz Eastwood, interviewed by telephone from Washington, D.C., grew up in California, but her father was O'ahu-born, and her grandparents' parties in San Francisco were island-style kanikapilas.

When she was 12, however, she learned that her father had been born outside of marriage and hanai'd; her grandparents weren't her grandparents and she wasn't Hispanic or Portuguese as she had thought.

For some people, this might have been shattering news, but she said the fact that her grandmother had hand-picked her hanai grandparents helped, as did the fact that her father's real dad had stayed in touch, though the children had always known him as "uncle."

"I have very low-drama parents," said Eastwood. "In the end, it didn't make any difference, everybody was still family." But it left her wondering where she fit in the Hawai'i landscape.

Then she returned to the Islands in 1993, as an adult, and "I had some kind of epiphany. I hate to sound strange but, I don't know, I lived there in a previous life or something."

Her husband, to whom she's been married seven years, feels the same.

One reason: "Barefoot at K-mart in what I went to sleep in." In other words, nobody cares how you're dressed or even who you are.

When Clint Eastwood goes to the store in Wailea, where they have a home, she said, "he doesn't leave a wake." Being Hawaiian to her means being open-hearted, open-handed and open-minded and not interested in defining people by ethnicity.

Eastwood is Irish, English, German and African, but she says, "I'm really Hawaiian, because that's what everyone is over there — everyone is everything."